Leveraging text messaging and conversational data to drive votes

We helped Hustle create the most cost-efficient political outreach tool on the market.

Background

Hustle is a peer-to-peer text messaging platform that provides organizations across the country with an affordable, efficient, and effective tool to reach their target supporters and customers. By facilitating two-way conversations, Hustle’s users can maintain genuine, personal dialogues with hundreds, thousands, and even millions of people.

Challenge

Hustle’s team had no shortage of insight on politics or building products for large-scale audiences—its leadership brought experience from Barack Obama’s groundbreaking digital efforts in 2008 and Facebook’s growth-stage platform team. But in some ways, their ambition was greater than both of those challenges. Their product would have to launch simultaneously on web, mobile, and text message, and it would be measured from Day 1 by ROI against the current state-of-the-art in campaign optimization. Text messaging was relatively unused as a political tool and came with some skepticism—if Hustle didn’t vastly outperform conventional methods and deliver a world-class experience, it would not get the benefit of the doubt.

Approach

The core of the problem for Hustle was helping political campaigns and nonprofits understand how they could effectively use texting to achieve their organizational goals at a fraction of the cost. Their system needed to be so simple that agents of varying technical sophistication could not only use it, but thrive with it.

Some of our contributions included:

Messaging workflow audit & redesign

Design & prototyping for iOS & Android

Analytics strategy & console design

Sales & marketing content creation

Brand design & positioning

IMPACT

3.95

Voters reached on Election Day 2016

48

More efficient than conventional voter outreach

1

Highest ROI campaign tool for two presidential candidates

96

Net promoter score among campaign managers

Results

Hustle’s unprecedented effectiveness in voter outreach led it to secure millions in venture funding from top firms like Social+Capital, features in Bloomberg and The New York Times, and relationships with top US political campaigns and nonprofits.

“Hustle became a central tenant of Vote.org’s work because the tool has allowed us to set new records of cost-efficiency for voter registration – and amongst some of the traditionally-difficult segments of the population to register.”

– Debra Cleaver, Founder, VOTE.ORG

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